Every clinical claim on TipsForAcne is traced to a named, linked source: the 2024 AAD acne guideline, FDA drug labels, Cochrane reviews and PubMed-indexed trials. The tables behind those claims are published here as CSV and JSON under a Creative Commons licence, for your own research, reporting or product. No signup, no API key, no rate limit.
- 58 treatments
- 26 ingredient pairings
- 23 guideline statements
- CC BY 4.0
Can I reuse TipsForAcne’s data, and what is it actually good for?
Yes: every table is published as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, with no signup and no key, as long as you credit TipsForAcne and link back.
That is 58 acne treatments with the guideline’s recommendation strength and the GRADE certainty of evidence recorded as two separate fields (0 of the 14 strong recommendations rest on high-certainty evidence, which is how dermatology evidence looks, not a scandal: the old, cheap, well-established drugs have the thinnest trials), 26 two-ingredient pairings each with a sourced verdict (only 3 have to be kept apart; most “don’t mix” rules turn out to be caveats), and the 2024 AAD guideline itself as 23 rows.
The most useful thing in here is the split between strength and certainty. Almost every product page and most skincare content blurs the two; put them side by side and you can tell a well-supported recommendation from a confident one. The pairings table is the second most useful, because it names the study or label behind each verdict rather than repeating a rule. Keep the checked date next to any row you copy, and remember these describe populations, not you.
My read of the verified data on this page. Disagree or spot an error? Tell Kelsey.
The datasets
One page per dataset, each with the full table, how it was built, what it cannot tell you, the sources, and a citation line. The interactive tools they come from are linked from each.
58 treatments
Acne treatment evidence
Guideline position and certainty of evidence recorded separately for every treatment, with time to effect, cautions, pregnancy notes and the source for each row.
/acne-evidence-map.json26 pairings
Acne ingredient pairings
Every researched pairing of 22 ingredients with a verdict (fine together, keep apart, ask a prescriber, untested), the reason, how to use them, and the study or label it rests on.
/data/acne-ingredient-pairings.json23 statements
AAD 2024 acne guideline
The 18 graded recommendations and 5 good practice statements as a table: number, recommendation, strength (strong or conditional) and GRADE certainty.
/data/aad-2024-recommendations.json
Licence and citation
These datasets are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may copy, redistribute, transform and build on them, including commercially, as long as you credit TipsForAcne and link back. The underlying facts (what a guideline recommends, what a label says) belong to no one.
https://tipsforacne.com/data/
How the data is produced
Every row originates on a TipsForAcne reference page where the records are maintained: the evidence map, the ingredient checker and the guideline explainer. The datasets are generated from those pages, so a correction on the page flows into the data, and each record carries its source. Nothing is modelled or filled in: where a guideline is silent or nothing has been tested, the field says so (“insufficient evidence”, “nobody has tested this”).
Corrections are published openly on the corrections page. Articles are drafted with AI assistance and every source is read and linked on the claim; no row has been reviewed by a clinician, and none claims to have been.
Known limits
- Strength and certainty are different things. “Strong, low certainty” means the panel was confident despite thin trials; it is common for old, established treatments and is not a warning.
- Pairings are pairs, not routines. The checker covers two ingredients at a time and cannot account for your skin, your prescription strength or your other medicines.
- Silence is not a recommendation against. Topics the guideline does not address are recorded as “not assessed”, not as evidence of anything.
- Coverage is deliberate, not exhaustive. The tables cover the treatments and pairings the site has researched in full, not every product on a shelf.
- General information, not medical advice. Written by an adult with acne who is not a dermatologist; see the editorial policy and sources.
Using this data in something public? We would rather you cite it than scrape it: the evidence map is served live at /acne-evidence-map.json and /acne-evidence-map.csv with open CORS, every dataset is also served at /data/<slug>.json, and the guide for AI tools is at /llms.txt.